Have you checked out that game-changing HQ for political news and analysis, the Huffington Post, lately? The site is a trove of deepthink policy analysis. Take “Political Grandstanding: Excessive Compensation and the Health Care Bill.” You tell ’em, Aaron Zelinsky! Your analysis of Section 162 (m) of the Internal Revenue Code drew 13 comments.
President Obama’s freshly-announced effort to do something about Afghanistan inspired the op-ed, “Talking the Talk: An Exercise in Irony from West Point to Oslo,” that accused Obama of being a cog in Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex. It sprouted 14 comments.
Keep scrolling down the front page on Thursday morning’s edition, and the enlightenment never stops. See “How Jerry Brown Cleared the Political Field for Governor of California” (19 comments) or a Democrat Congresswoman’s plea that “Health Reform Is No Place for an Abortion Fight” (20 comments). Also, there’s breaking news in Chicago: “11 Injured in Fire at 56-Story High-Rise” (10 comments).
It may discombobulate you to learn that none of these was among the most popular stories on HuffPo. No. 1: “Lindsay Lohan’s Muse Photos: Threesomes, All Fours, Butt and a Breast.” Seven hundred and eighty-three commenters were stirred to state their reactions; many others, one assumes, were stirred in other ways and had no hands free to type. The Lohan item turned out to link to (I blush with pride) a story from your own newspaper, the New York Post.
HuffPo’s No. 2 story: “Holly Sampson PHOTOS, Pictures Of Porn Star, Tiger Woods’ Mistress.” No. 3 was sort of about politics but really about a sort of scandal of the heart involving a celebrity whose policy positions are beside the point (“Palin’s Father: She Left Hawaii Because Asians Made Her Uncomfortable” drew 7,728 comments, though the confusing underlying quotation doesn’t clearly say much of anything: “They were a minority type thing and it wasn’t glamorous, so she came home”). This item was accompanied by an interactive sidebar that begged readers to “Rate the Palin Crazy” from a scale of 1 (“kinda weird”) to 10 (“totally nuts”).
Other hot items on HuffPo Thursday morning were: (4) “The Funniest Facebook Snafus of All Time,” (5) “Joslyn James PICTURES: Photos of ANOTHER Alleged Tiger Woods Porn Star Mistress,” (6) “Adrianne James: I Love To Play ‘World of Warcraft’ Naked and Stoned,” (7) “Elin Nordegren, Tiger Woods’ Wife, MOVES OUT of Woods’ Home, Report Says” and so on.
What’s this prove? That the Huffington Post, despite Arianna Huffington’s bluster, is not one of those well-reasoned current-events publications, dedicated to making sense of the news as filtered through a political viewpoint, like The New Republic or The National Review or The New York Times.
The Huffington Post is simply an e-tabloid, at times a meta-tabloid providing tabloid coverage of material it stole from other tabloids. If this is the revolutionary future marketplace of liberal ideas, then apparently liberalism has a one-track mind — and it ain’t Obama.
HuffPo is a “news-and-politics site” only in the way that those bedraggled neon porn shops on Eighth Avenue are “video stores.” (Thanks to a loophole unearthed during the Giuliani Administration, you’re not a porn merchant if 60% of your stock is non-porn, so the gentlemen of the XXX trade instantly raided the Salvation Army to cover 3/5 of their shelf space with battered VHS copies of “The Goonies”).
Newsday, always far more grown-up than the Huffington Post, was famously derided as “a tabloid in a tutu,” but the HuffPo bumbles across the landscape like Michael Moore in a tutu. A better name for it would be the FluffPo.
Here at America’s most legendary tabloid (I have the honor of crossing paths with the greats who came up with “Headless Body in Topless Bar,” “Stray-Rod” and “Axis of Weasel” every day), we look at the Huffington Post and think: Keep trying, lads. Eat your vegetables, do your homework. Hire some reporters to do something other than loot stories from other sites, sign up for night classes at pun school and maybe someday you’ll have one-tenth of the wit, zest and cunning of the news source you are so pitiably imitating.